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A Free Internet Backup Service

For years I've had an RSYNC backup solution for my immediate family's computers. Each computer would perform a remote RSYNC over SSH to my home Linux box on a daily basis. It worked great, but it was a pain in the butt for a few reasons:
  1. Lots of parts to maintain.
  2. A lack of on-disk encryption.
  3. No easy restoration process.
  4. Required me to have a server powered up all the time.
Recently, I stumbled upon a Mac and Windows internet backup solution for the grand price of Free. It's called Mozzy Home, and its pretty darn good for the following reasons:
  1. It's free for the first 2 GB of storage
  2. It supports encryption - Mozy can't even see your file content (but it does appear that they can see your filenames and directory structure)
  3. It is super easy to set up
  4. The client software is pretty good, and supports easy restores.
You can get a free Mozy Home account here (shameless referral code attached):

https://mozy.com/registration/free

The biggest limitation with the (free) Mozy Home is the 2 GB limit. But for about $5 a month, you can back up an unlimited amount of storage - that's a lot!

Now I was thinking "Cool, now I can back up the terabytes of storage of my work server for $60 bucks a year". Um, no. The license doesn't seem to allow for that kind of use... and for good reason - crazy customers would likely swamp them with "unlimited" data. For professional use, you have to go for their "Pro" plan, which, sadly, fails to support pro-class platforms such as Unix, Linux, or even Mac OS.

So although Mozy isn't my option for the corporate servers I'm responsible for, it is a fine solution for Windows and Macintosh home computers. It greatly simplifies my Family Technical Support responsibilities, and I won't have to discuss the difficultly of data recovery when a drive crashes.

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